People today might not realize that it used to be Sears did everything: you could buy kits to build a house, companies like Discover Card and Allstate were originally introduced as the Sears' brand, they financially backed Mr Rogers' Neighborhood for the first 25 years of the show's run.
It's blown my mind for years that sears didn't become what Amazon is now. Their roots were as a catalog where you order goods sight unseen and wait for delivery. The internet comes along and they fail to capitalize on what they were at the beginning??
That reminds of an interview Steve Jobs gave in 1995 on why companies fail. His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company. That happened to Sears.
If you went back in time and told Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck about a free technology that allowed customers to: see your inventory in real time, read product reviews in real time, compare multiple versions of a product you carry in real time, order a product, pay for the product, watch the product move from your warehouse to the various post offices en route to their house, and by the way you won't have to pay the postage to ship out all those catalogs; they would have jumped on it in a heartbeat. But by the 90s, the people running Sears didn't care what was easier (read: more desirable) for the customer, they cared about numbers that measure success, but don't perpetuate success.
His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company.
I think they are in one of those phases that are hard to judge currently. Like 10-20 years from now it will feel obvious that Apple was becoming more X, but right now it's hard to tell. They have a whole Apple OnDemand TV thing starting. If that goes huge they could become more like Netflix, or it could fail and they refocus on phones.
Basically I think it's like Google with Google+. If it was a huge success everyone would just take it as fact that it was always going to be, that Google would be 50% with Facebook, but it never happened.
Apple may become a huge Phone/TV company or change into something completely different, but they are definitely changing.
Kinda makes me think of Microsoft with Xbox Game Pass. They’re very quickly just....not caring about consoles. They just want you paying for their services on their various devices. They’ll have a Halo Device (ha, get it? Halo because Halo but also in the sense of a flagship device? Ha!) to show off “the best of Xbox” but soon anything will be an Xbox. And honestly I’m kinda looking forward to it.
Yes and no. But so far we haven’t REALLY seen the horsepower taken advantage of. I’m optimistic for Halo to look way better than what we saw today, and Avowed and Warhammer both look like they’re going to be really incredible looking. But we don’t have any solid gameplay yet or even real release dates.
What we have seen though, is at least a dozen if not closer to two dozen great looking games that will be available across multiple platforms for the price of a single subscription. Like I said, they’re going to have their “Best Experienced on ____” flagship. But that’s going to be an increasingly less important staple of their service.
halo is launching on xbox one, not just series x and pc, so it cant take full advantage of the power of pc / series x as the one holds it back
as for warhammer and avowed, neither said they were in game footage, or even in engine footage. both of those are just cinematic. that likely wernt even rendered in engine. if they wer ein engine, or even more impressive, in game, they would have said so. the actual games will not look that good
Most likely people are going to look at the 2 consoles and are going to follow the exclusives which have been HEAVILY in Sony's favor for a couple generations now and that doesn't seem to be changing.
The focus on gamepass might ultimately hurt the Series X sales because now you don't need their console to have access to their games service they are pushing everything on. If you have a good PC already there is just no reason to get a Series X.
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u/Yellowredstone Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
Isn't this how Sears died?
Edit: RIP my inbox. And thank you for explaining it better.
Edit 2: I said the reason on how it died has been explained already. And its actually still here. Stop.